di quel che non c'è si fa senza

Wednesday, 12 October 2005

Big changes on stakhanov last weekend: I switched from sarge to etch, mainly for X.org (and yes, also because I like having daily upgrades and stable releases are so boring!).
debian is great for this type of things, I simply modified /etc/apt/sources.list and ran apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, more than 500 packages were upgraded (included the kernel image) and dozens were added or removed. I had to respond to some questions and to check few configuration files and only the x-window-system-core package (that had been kept back) needed an additional apt-get install x-window-system-core. After reboot I had a perfectly working and configured debian etch, excellent!

Unfortunatly not all is good with debian. After upgrading I had to mess around with source packages to:

Well, In my opinion managing source packages is a pain. The key principles are solid and I like them, every package includes:

the original source,

a patch file to yield the debian version of the code,

debian magic to build and set up everything in a consistent manner.

The problem is in the magic that is often too much complicated! They are many tools to help with it (man dpkg-source) but, if one is not a geek (and I'm not), he has to toil a lot to create his customized binary package.
So one contents oneself to build the sources and to use the binaries outside the debian packaging system :-( but odd things still happen. For example, in my case:

xorg-xserver source package had dependencies problems and couldn't be builded. Ok, I'm using a testing release and there could be problems but also I'm presenlty using the binaries of xorg-xserver and so it is strange,

the only way I found to obtain the source tree of PostgreSQL was building the package postgresql-7.4, a little bit inconvenient.

Maybe all these complications and oddities with the source packages are the price to pay to have a so powerful binary packages management system but I feel that it could (and it should) be simpler. Maybe the next time I'll install an operating system I'll try another distribution (gentoo? Or something of totally different?)